EUREKA REPORTER (California) 20 December 05 Flying leap (Wendy Butler)
Ellin Beltz kept pet frogs while she was living in Chicago, Ill., where she volunteered and worked at Lincoln Park Zoo.
About 12 frogs sat in separate enclosures behind her dining room table in her house.
The Ferndale transplant, also a biologist and herpetologist, said that Piggy was one of her favorite frogs. The creature’s dimensions could be compared to those of a bullfrog.
“(We) got him as a tadpole,” she said. “He lived for 11 years. He was personally responsible for four scientific papers.”
That didn’t mean he wrote them.
Piggy made unusual noises.
“It was banging its ear drums … on the water surface and making this noise,” she said. “I mentioned that to a young graduate student.”
That student created an academic report. That led to follow-up papers by other students.
That frog had introduced “another level of communication,” Beltz said. “The frog is trying to find other frogs. … It’s not just the puff-the-throat-out call.
“Piggy was directly responsible for that first paper, … because nobody had even thought of these noises until then.”
This is one of many observations Beltz has compiled about frogs during her fascination with them since childhood.
Beltz’s book “Frogs: Inside Their Remarkable World” (Firefly Books LTD-Toronto) was released in September.
She will give a talk about how she “became a frog person,” how to properly collect frogs to study and also will present a local frogs slide show today at 5:30 p.m. at Eureka’s Strictly for the Birds at 123 F St.
“Inside Their Remarkable World” is available at Northtown, Borders and Rookery bookstores, the HSU Natural History Museum, Strictly for the Birds and online at amazon.com.
The book has a chapter about natural history and frogs’ evolution.
It also includes a chronological chapter about frog families, from the ancient Ascaphidae (Tailed Frogs), which live in fast-flowing mountain streams in North America, to the Mantellidae (Mantellas), which live on Madagascar.
This chapter includes a mention of the family Paleobatrachidae, which were found in Europe and North America and are the only known family that has gone extinct.
Other chapters address frogs’ anatomy and also their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions.
Chapter Five is titled “Frogs in Myth & Culture” and it covers how frogs represent a multitude of things for different cultures throughout the world – death to transformation to rebirth.
It includes trivia tidbits that some readers will discover for the first time:
Paintings on Cretan storage jars dating to about 2000 BCE show frogs or toads with a sign believed by many to represent the womb.
Three witches conjured toad toxin in William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” – “ … For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble …”
A bit of pop trivia belongs to the television program “Ally McBeal,” which aired an episode in 1998 in which a character had a pet frog, Steven, until one night poorly written instructions on how to feed the frog turned him into an appetizer. This caused an outcry among animal rights activists.
Beltz said that to her knowledge the last time someone published a book like hers was in 1934 with the release of a frog and toad handbook by Albert and Anna Wright.
“We’ve learned an awful lot,” Beltz said. “My editors let me tell the story of the families of frogs in the order in which they developed over time. … Every other book does it in alphabetical order.”
The publisher paid for all of the book’s worldwide frog photographs, too.
Beltz’s research included her phoning experts throughout the world, such as Michael Tyler with the University of Adelaide in Australia, who discussed the chytrid fungus, which is fatal to frogs.
Tyler also informed Beltz that a fluid a certain frog excretes can kill HIV.
“One of the Australian frogs’ sweat kills HIV instantly,” Beltz said. “This is why we need to keep them alive, among other reasons. … They’ve been around since before the dinosaurs even evolved.”
How does a person relate to a frog?
One of the most striking recognitions for Beltz as a child was her discovering that frogs possessed intelligence.
“I was thinking about this thing and it was thinking about me,” she said. “They were like little jewels.
“I think if you spend time actually watching them – whether you have them in a box or whether you have them in a yard – you see that they’re independent fully functional beings.”
Flying leap